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Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…do the pervasive myth of modernity. It was out of this moment of disruption, then, that I switched tracks from the project I had been working on and onto the beginnings of what would eventually become this book. A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. This is often supposed to be true of America and Western Europe if nowhere else. The Myth of Disenchant…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…can’t turn the channel here because it’s right in front of you,” said Casey, 73, who for the last dozen years has split her time between Kathmandu and Laguna Beach, Calif. “So when I left here, I said, I’ve got to come back. My son’s a physician and he said let’s just focus on what you can do because you can’t do everything,” she said. Yes, but what we can do we must do, I told Casey, recalling the wise words a friend told me years ago, words that…

Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

By Amina Wadud

…to think about whether or not everyone also does this manual flush, because, well, I’ve used enough outhouses at amusement parks or natural sights in America with no water to be thankful for what I had. Then I needed to make wudu’ and headed for the nifty wudu’ stations. Unfortunately, these too were saturated with water. Never mind my description before of the drain for removing the waste water—it was there, alright, but like the toilet, I don’t…

Are You Rapture Ready?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…t up around Nashville, Tennessee and other cities like Detroit, Little Rock, Omaha, and Kansas City announcing the second coming. The cheesy billboards remind me of signs teasing a television series or the opening of a Broadway show. Jesus is about to make his big entrance only his final number will feature the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tom Evans, spokesman for Family Radio said their math for setting the return date came from a verse in Lu…

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

…ay 10 piece, “Coming Out As a Heretic.” I too grew up in a Christian family, and, despite very intense Christian devotion and deep soul- and scripture-searching, I “fell away” from the faith in my early twenties. I have been “unchurched” for about six years now and have often struggled to identify my current relationship to the Christian faith. Simply identifying as an atheist at first felt uncomfortable to me for a number of reasons. All of my f…

What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

By John Stoehr

…ates run by Republican governors; this week’s shooting massacre in San Jose, Calif., and every other one like it; and, let’s see, what else? Well, feel free at the end of this piece to add your own examples. There are plenty more. All have in common the political concept that God divided the world between the elected and the unelected, that is, between His chosen and everyone else deserving of eternal damnation. (They deserve what’s coming to them…

Was Ghana Anti-Gay Scare Just Politics?

By Warren Throckmorton

…rison to Uganda’s recent history in relation to sexual minorities. In March, 2009, three Americans spoke at a conference on homosexuality and used false and misleading information to inflame public sentiment against gays. Later that year, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was tabled. Although it did not get a vote in the recently expired Eighth Parliament, it will most likely be reintroduced soon in the new session. If passed, the law will make any homo…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…onstitutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a referenc…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…iration to get up and go. Gates of Splendor continues to be evoked in books, songs, and videos (see here and here). For many though, the real miracle occurred when Elisabeth Elliot returned to the Waorani two years after her husband was killed, along with her and Jim’s three-year old daughter. They stayed several years, made themselves something of a home, and even converted a number of the Waorani. The evangelical conversation about Elliot and th…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…f Florida met this past weekend in Jacksonville for their annual convention, themed, “One Body,” which began with a service led by presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori calling for unity. In recent years the convention has been tense with debates over the future of the diocese and even the Church itself. But this year, “nothing much happened,” according to a friend of mine who was a delegate. “The most contentious issue voted on had to do wit…